Overloading fstream's << and >> operators

The extraction and insertion operators for fstream only read/write from/to disk in human readable text form. I would like to override them so that when I set the flag to binary, the operators would work like a binary read or write would. I realize for structures I would use read and write, but to simply write single values read and write are a pain in the arse.

How would I go about overloading << and >> relative to fstream binary mode? My guess is I probably need to derive from fstream and use basic_streambuf's protected buffer function members to extract/insert the data in binary mode?

Any help would be appreciated.

No, it is much simpler. There are plenty of examples on the Web, if you google for operator overloading.

Basically you need two non-member functions (declared friends, if the class data is otherwise inaccessible).

The prototypes are

Code:

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std::ostream& operator << (std::ostream& os, const MyClass&);
std::istream& operator >> (std::istream& is, MyClass&);

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Yep. Just found the info on the web. Seems straightforward enough.

Thanks.